The Obama administration has signalled its support for India’s “surgical” cross-border military strikes carried out on Sept 28-29 night in PoK.
Targeting terrorist launch pads, India sent special commando forces to more than a half-dozen places up to three kilometers inside PoK. They inflicted “heavy,” “double-digit” casualties on “terrorists and those trying to shield them.”
Pakistan, while contesting the Indian version of events, concedes that two of its soldiers were killed and nine wounded Wednesday night.
Washington’s support for Indian strikes involves more than a desire to cement its alliance with India. Its relations with Pakistan are badly frayed and increasingly characterized by bitterness and suspicion, in part because of Islamabad’s attempt to ensure itself a major say in any political settlement of the Afghan war by retaining ties to sections of the Taliban, especially the Haqqani network. But even more fundamental are Pakistan’s close ties to China.
When questioned Thursday about Washington’s attitude toward the Indian strikes, Obama administration officials repeatedly issued general, pro-forma calls for both sides to show restraint and engage in dialogue, while insisting that Pakistan had to do more to prevent cross-border “terrorism.”
Suggesting, as New Delhi does, that “terrorism” is the central cause of India-Pakistan tensions US State Department spokesman John Kirby said: “Our message to both sides has been the same in terms of encouraging them to increase communication to deal with [the terrorist] threat and to avoid steps that escalate the tensions. And I’m…not going to get into characterizing each and every step along the way there.”
Ex-US government officials have been lining up to voice support for India’s new military-strategic posture.
Bruce Riedel, a long-time CIA analyst and former Af-Pak War adviser to the Obama administration, told the Hindustan Times that India was within its rights to attack Pakistan, citing as a precedent Washington’s illegal Predator drone strikes and other violations of Pakistan sovereignty.
“India,” said Riedel, “can note that the United States has been carrying out attacks in Pakistan for over a decade to kill terrorists, including Osama bin Laden and Mullah Mansour (the Afghan Taliban chief summarily executed last May).”
Ashley Tellis, who in the administration of George W. Bush played a key role in negotiating the 2008 Indo-US civil nuclear accord, was no less emphatic in support of India’s attack. Indian Prime Minister Modi, he told the Press Trust of India, “could not let the outrage at Uri go unanswered.”
Tellis praised the Indian action as “carefully measured.” He added, “Striking at terrorist launch pads was meant to signal that India has not lost its freedom to retaliate, but puts the onus of further escalation on Pakistan.”
John Blank, a former South Asian policy adviser to the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee and currently a Rand Corporation analyst,” said “any (US) criticism of India for a cross-border action would have seemed hypocritical,” given its own “surgical strike against Obama bin Laden in Abbottabad (Pakistan).”
Blank pointed to the significance of the Wednesday evening phone call between the Indian and US national security advisers. “The phone call between Ajit Doval and Susan Rice…enlisted the US to help prevent a Pakistani counter-strike.”
During the Cold War, Pakistan was a key US ally. Washington armed its military and encouraged it in its military-strategic rivalry with India.
The US outsourced to Pakistani intelligence agency, ISI, the training of the Afghan mujahedeen and allied Arab fundamentalist forces it used in the 1980s to bleed the Soviet Union in a proxy war in Afghanistan, while backing to the hilt Pakistan’s Islamist dictator, Zia ul-Haq.
But since Obama launched the “pivot to Asia” in 2011, the US has sought to make India the fourth pillar of its anti-China alliance alongside its key Asian-Pacific allies, Japan and Australia.
Under Modi, India is asserting itself as the regional power. This has involved diplomatic and political thrusts.
On their part, Beijing and Islamabad have strengthened their own longstanding strategic ties. A key element in this is the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a $46 billion network of rail, road, pipeline and power projects linking western China to Pakistan’s Arabian Sea port of Gwadar.